Weapons and pornography. Is it just good business?

Have you ever thought to yourself how we all speak about war and how the world is in shits and how humans kill everything including each other yet no one seems to speak about the weapons manufacturing companies and dealers? I would like to state that I believe this world is filled with so much good and it far surpasses the bad. The media just loves to fucking sing to our lizard brains and we love to fucking receive it.

It’s so interesting to me that no one ever reports (at least that I’ve seen) as to where the weapons that kill millions are actually coming from. All of these weapons are coming from somewhere, right?

I imagine if I had a weapons manufacturing company, which according to Google is a five hundred billion dollar industry, how much interest would I have in world peace? What is my marketing strategy, to move all this weaponry, as small as a bullett to tanks and fighter jets? What is my motivation as a weapons manufacturer? I would be pumped for a war and pumped to have instability in the world. 

Peace is bad for business. Love is bad for business. Instability and chaos fills the bank. 

How about pornography? It’s not as big, but its still a ten billion dollar industry. They are producing and humans are buying. 

Lets take the ethics out of it for a second. Are the pharmaceutical companies, the oil companies, the insurance companies and the education organizations any different? The products and services offered may be different, but the systems that keep them going are pretty much the same. They sell and we buy. 

We contribute to all of these systems. 

So, what do we do? Raise our white flag and say, we are just one person, what the fuck can I possibly do? I will never break the system? It’s too big, we just can’t compete? On the flip side, we may say to ourselves I’m going to fight the system, I’m going to protest, to picket, to expose them to the world for all their crimes. 

Both fair positions, but they have one thing in common. Neither will lead to a lasting change. 

How about another approach. Lets take this from a macro to a micro level. Lets look at you and me and our habits. Habits are a pathway wired within our brain. I learned this past year in Positive Psychology that existing pathways cannot to be destroyed. However, what we can do is generate new pathways parallel to the existing one. The more we walk down the new pathway, the weaker the old pathway gets. 

See where I’m going with this? Let me give you a quick example. 

I always love to use smoking as an example because I smoked for almost twenty-five years, fifteen of which I spent an agonizing dance of quitting and re-starting. There were many pathways and triggers created that would result in me lighting up. One was in the car. Every time I was driving, especially in traffic, I would light up. To change that habit, I didn’t try to break the pathway (ok, initially I did try to change or break it), I replaced it with coffee, water and tea. Every time I craved a cigarette in the car, I took a sip of my drink. It took some time but I eventually succeeded in the end. 

So, As bad as you think that all of our systems are, as war is or pornography is, our feelings are important but they are not going to change either of these industries. The pathways and systems are too strong and too ingrained. 

What is very much doable is too counter it by creating new pathways, in this larger case, new systems that will rival the weapons and pornography systems. To try and break these pathways from the top results in zero long term change. 

It’s time to create new pathways and systems from the ground up, with the knowing that there is a very high possibility that we will not be a witness to the  results of long term change.